Death Row Inmate Who Chose To Be Executed By Firing Squad Reportedly Suffered 30-60 Seconds Of "Excruciating Conscious Pain And Suffering" Because The Firing Squad Missed Their Target

NPR – Pathologists say the injuries likely caused the prisoner pain and suffering while he was still conscious.

"He's not going to die instantaneously from this," said Dr. Carl Wigren, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy documents for NPR. "I think that it took him some time to bleed out."

On May 8, lawyers for Mahdi notified the South Carolina Supreme Court that the execution was "botched." They cited the state's autopsy and a forensic report that Mahdi's lawyers commissioned from another pathologist, Dr. Jonathan Arden.

"Mr. Mahdi did experience excruciating conscious pain and suffering for about 30 to 60 seconds after he was shot," Arden wrote in his analysis of the state autopsy.

What a poetic twist of fate. South Carolina has reintroduced the firing squad this year. When you're on death row in South Carolina, you can choose between death by lethal injection, electric chair, or three prison guards shooting you in the heart. I blogged about a different South Carolina man's firing squad execution back in March. When he decided on firing squad, he citied a long history of botched lethal injections & electric chairs that resulted in a slow painful deaths. "Luckily" for that guy, the firing squad shot him right in the heart. But this next guy, Mikal Mahdi, who was on death row for a triple murder involving a cop who he shot 8 times then set on fire, wasn't so lucky. Mahdi didn't offer an explanation for why he opted for firing squad, but I have to imagine it was a similar reason. If that's the case... tough break my guy. Better luck next time. 

I really don't get why our country has to complicate the death penalty so much. If we're going to use it, just make it simple. I sorta see why they don't just have one prison guard stick a gun to the prisoners head and pull the trigger. It's maybe a little much to ask a minimum wage prison guard to kill a man executioner style. That could fuck with your head a bit. Shooting a man dead from a distance with a couple of your prison guard pals along side of you is probably a little easier to stomach. And I suppose the powers at be find it uncouth to repeatedly fire rounds at the executionee's head. Which would assure a quick death, but result in a lot of brains splattered all over the death room. Not that people on death row necessarily deserve to die with dignity, but nobody wants to scrape brains off the ground. That's just icky. 

But the most ridiculous thing about how South Carolina carries out their firing squad executions is that they insist on doing so in the same tiny little room they carry out lethal injections and the electric chair.

I don't know why they can't go outside. I don't know why the firing squad can't fire multiple rounds at the guy's chest to be sure. And I especially don't know how they managed to choose a guy for their firing squad who despite being in that tiny little room, managed to miss the man completely. He didn't only miss the guy's heart. When they inspected his body afterwards, they only found 2 bullet wounds. Somebody fired a live bullet into the damn wall. 

Mikal Mahdi died on April 11 after being shot by a three-person firing squad. But an autopsy revealed two wounds on his chest, not three. None of the bullets hit his heart directly, as is supposed to happen during the execution. Instead, the wounds caused damage to his liver and other internal organs, and allowed his heart to keep beating. 

Part of me wonders if the prison guards did it on purpose. Maybe they thought this guy was an especially big piece of shit, even by "sentenced to death" standards, and pulled a Percy from The Green Mile to make sure he suffered.

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But if that's what they did, they may have inadvertently put an end to South Carolina's firing squad fun altogether. Now Mikal Mahdi's lawyers are using this botched execution to try and have the firing squad removed as a death penalty option altogether. When you look at the language used by the South Carolina Supreme Court when they put the firing squad back in play, I can't help but think they might have a case.

In 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that all three methods were legal, writing that the firing squad was not cruel because a prisoner would not suffer longer than 15 seconds.

"The evidence before us convinces us—though an inmate executed via the firing squad is likely to feel pain, perhaps excruciating pain—that the pain will last only ten to fifteen seconds," the justices wrote, adding that it would be true "…unless there is a massive botch of the execution in which each member of the firing squad simply misses the inmate's heart."

I can't help but think they might have a case.

I'm not shedding a tear for this guy, but I still don't get why the death penalty has to be so hard? I don't get why they can't fire more bullets. I don't get how nobody has managed to come up with a lethal injection formula that doesn't work how it's supposed to 100% of the time. What about Fentanyl? Have they not considered Fentanyl? It's on every street corner. It's killing people who aren't even trying to die. There's just zero reason it should be this difficult.